Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 20.pdf/122

 REVEREND EZRA FISHER

114

Yet our servants and their fellow treasury from Oregon. laborers have been laboring as fast as they thought the churches would bear to bring about this object in as healthy and as permanent a manner as possible. have to meet

We

the influence of monthly Sabbaths and Missouri opinions, and an educated anti-mission influence in our missionary all

These prejudices are so far worn away

churches.

I believe

in all our churches that they, as churches, recognize the principle that our ministry should be given to the work and that they should be sustained somehow or other in that work.

At our one

association

last

man

in

we made

a direct effort to sustain

Lane County, which was an important missionary

should at that time have pleaded the cause of the Mission Society and asked that these efforts might in some way or other have gone through that channel, but for the fact that your Board was at the time sustaining no I

field.

Home

man

but myself in Oregon.

The

right kind of

work was

doing to accomplish the work and open the sympathies of our brethren. The churches as a whole are coming up to the work, although much slower than is desired by every It is hard teaching our liberal-souled disciple of Christ. brethren the lesson of being dead to the world and alive to God. Yet four churches, two of which were as little hopeful as any in the Association, have absolutely paid their minister

(Br. Riley) not less than $1000 the last year by buying him a claim and providing him with clothing and food for his family. Four more are paying Br. Chandler the present year

And I do not know of a church, small as our churches are, which pays their minister less than $100 for onefourth of the time, while they scarcely get the labors of the minister more than two days in a month, except in the riding nearly $600.

to

and from the appointments, which may take two days more. will perceive that your missionaries have not been

Thus you

indifferent to the true interests of Christ's church, although we have not been able to do so much as we would, nor to direct

what

is

done through the channel which might be